Still Chasing the Stratford Streak, 80 Years After He Left the Ice

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Howie Morenz around 1920.CreditMontreal Archives

By Stephen Smith

June 17, 2017

STRATFORD, Ontario — Howie Morenz wept when he finally agreed to join the Montreal Canadiens in 1923, abandoning his family and a budding career as a railway machinist in Stratford to become the world’s greatest hockey player.

That’s the story: He didn’t want to go, refusing to believe he was good enough for the N.H.L. Within the year, he won his first Stanley Cup. He was already what an admiring rival called “that near-perfect human hockey machine.”

For 14 years his legend grew. Then, shockingly, 80 years ago this spring, he died at the age of 34, about six weeks after breaking his leg in a game. His friends said Morenz’s heart shattered when he realized his career was over.

His hockey résumé by then included two more Stanley Cups. Three times he was named the N.H.L.’s most valuable player, and twice he led the league’s scorers. He was part of the inaugural Hockey Hall of Fame class in 1945. In 1950, Canadian sportswriters named Morenz the best hockey player of the half-century. More recently, he was named one of the N.H.L.’s 100 greatest players as part of the league’s centennial celebration this year.

Not so easily quantified is how much Morenz’s blazing talents helped solidify the N.H.L.’s early success, especially in brand-new American markets. Beloved in Montreal, he was the league’s biggest box-office draw. The sight of Morenz in motion is said to have persuaded the boxing promoter Tex Rickard to start up the New York Rangers.

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A Howie Morenz mural in the village of Mitchell, near Stratford, Ontario.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

With several other Canadian players, including Boston’s obstreperous Eddie Shore, Morenz was called “the Babe Ruth of hockey.” But Morenz was the one the Bambino himself venerated. Ruth said Morenz had the biggest heart of any athlete he’d known.

Today, many visitors trek to Stratford, a city of 33,000, for its Shakespearean festival; others, perhaps, are pilgrims seeking Justin Bieber sites. He, like Morenz, grew up here.

But while you can book “Twelfth Night” tickets online, or download Stratford Tourism’s 25-point map of sacred Bieber locations, a century after Morenz’s family arrived in town you’re on your own when it comes to finding monuments to him.

Still, those monuments are here to be found. Portraits hang in the city’s arenas, and there’s a street named after Morenz. After you’ve gazed at the family house on Wellington Street, where Morenz signed his first contract, you might venture 20 minutes west, to the smaller town of Mitchell, where Morenz was born in 1902.

The wider world may have lauded Morenz as the Stratford Streak, but in his birthplace, he’ll always be the Mitchell Meteor. The arena of his youth is gone, but if you stand in Morenz Park and peer north, you start to get your bearings on his story.

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Dean Robinson, an author and authority on hockey and Howie Morenz, who died 80 years ago. The romantic version of Morenz’s life and death suggests he died when he learned an injury would end his career.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

It helps to have Dean Robinson on hand. Mitchell-born, this historian last fall published a new edition of his 1982 biography, “Howie Morenz: Hockey’s First Superstar.” Robinson will tell you how Morenz skipped piano lessons to play pond hockey, and show you the spot, near where Whirl Creek joins the Thames River.

“He was good when he played here, but he wasn’t yet a standout,” Robinson said. “There were a couple of other guys who were better.”

Toronto tried to sign Morenz in 1923 before Montreal secured his signature. Robinson wonders if Morenz’s mother, Rose, would have nixed his plan to turn professional if she had been alive. Just over a year earlier, Morenz, then 19, returned home from hockey to learn his mother had drowned in a basement cistern — “ill for some time and her mind unbalanced,” a Toronto newspaper reported.

As it was, Morenz doubted his decision from the moment he made it, and tried to escape his commitment until he left for training camp. Stratford did its best to keep him, too: Local businessmen offered him $1,000 to stay.

The Morenz era in Montreal was hatched on alternative fact. Unsure how a hockey player of German descent would be received after World War I, management switched Morenz’s background to Swiss.

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Morenz was born in Mitchell, near Stratford, Ontario.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

He thrived. The Canadiens were already known as the Flying Frenchmen, but Morenz, a center, and his two speedy wingers, Aurèle Joliat and Johnny Gagnon, accelerated the team’s attack and bolstered its popularity.

He was small, fragile-looking, but he played the game fast, with what looked like recklessness. Newspapermen trying to describe him in black and white wrote of comets and cyclones.

Morenz’s shot was said to be the N.H.L.’s hardest and most accurate. His body checks prompted a Toronto executive to deliver the highest praise he could muster: “I’ve seen many fellas throw up their dinner after he hit them.”

The novelist Hugh MacLennan watched Morenz play and said, “The little smile on his lips showed that he was having a wonderful time.”

Hockey players expect their sport to damage them: all those brash sticks and colliding bad tempers. Morenz tore ligaments, gashed his head, bruised a kidney. In 1932, a burglar bashed him over the head with a revolver. Another time, he was struck by lightning on a golf course.

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A roadway named for the late hockey superstar.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

Still, in 1934, he told reporters that he had four, five more seasons left in him. “I am not old,” he declared, “only 31.”

But he was slipping. He wasn’t scoring. Robinson said that fans in the Forum had booed Morenz, and that Morenz had cried.

When Montreal’s manager, Leo Dandurand, traded Morenz to the Chicago Black Hawks in 1934, he said it was to spare him further indignity.

Chicago was a bust, though. The goals didn’t return, and he was benched. He was traded again, this time to the Rangers.

The Canadiens bought him back in 1936. Reunited with his family, back with familiar wingers, he was revived. So were the Canadiens. Last in the N.H.L. the previous season, they had, by early 1937, clambered to the top.

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A Morenz tribute at the local arena in Stratford, Ontario.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

Chicago visited the Forum late in January. A big Black Hawk defenseman, Earl Seibert, caught Morenz on a rush, forced him behind the net. Morenz went down; the tip of his left skate dug into the boards and got stuck. When Seibert came crashing in, Morenz’s leg snapped. The Montreal newspaper La Patrie noted “un sinistre craquement” — a sinister crack.

“I’m all through,” Morenz is reported to have said.

A photograph on La Patrie’s front page the next morning showed him peering up from his hospital bed. Inside the paper, readers could examine radiographs of his fractures. “Rarely has surgery seen such a severe break,” Dr. Hector Forgues said.

A few days later, Morenz told reporters, “Don’t count me out yet.” In the weeks that followed, his room was filled with well-wishers, and an air of optimism. He was said to be mending well.

Then something happened.

Columnists mentioned “a violent nervous breakdown.” Vague at the time, the story hasn’t become clearer. Morenz was restrained in a straitjacket, a friend later said. Visitors were barred, and a guard stood at the door.

Morenz died on March 8: pulmonary embolism. The papers said “heart attack” and left it at that.

Three days later, some 10,000 mourners attended Morenz’s Forum funeral. Montrealers thronged the streets as the body was borne to Mount Royal Cemetery.

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The Morenz funeral in 1937.CreditArchives Canada

The Canadiens vowed no one would ever wear Morenz’s No. 7 again — not until his elder son, 10-year-old Howie Jr., was ready to join the team. A benefit game later in 1937 raised nearly $30,000 for the family, but other parts of the story’s epilogue are grim.

Kidnappers threatened the family. Later, an anguished Mary Morenz entrusted her three children to the care of an orphanage. Donald, 6, died of pleurisy before she remarried in 1939 and brought home Howie Jr. and Marlene.

Talented and hard-working, Howie Jr. tried his best to follow in his father’s skates. After a junior stint in Montreal, he skated professionally for the minor-league Dallas Texans before the Canadiens released him in 1949 because of an eye condition.

Howie Jr. died in 2015 at 88. His son, the third Howard Morenz, is in his 50s and lives in Ottawa. He played some hockey before deciding it wasn’t something he’d pursue.

But he has been a careful student of his grandfather’s career and legacy. Adjusting the way the death is depicted is a continuing project, as it was for his father. In Montreal in 1937, the notion that being deprived of hockey might prove fatal to a man was anything but remarkable.

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A statue of Howie Morenz in Centennial Plaza outside the Bell Centre in Montreal in 2009.CreditRichard Wolowicz/Getty Images

The family takes a different view.

“The broken heart, we felt, was really a romantic way of implying that he may have taken his own life,” Howard Morenz said. “We don’t believe that at all.”

His findings on his grandfather’s death fill two pages of Robinson’s updated biography. Morenz conceded that he did not have all the facts, and maybe never will. He does know that the coroner’s report mentioned “cardiac deficiency” and “acute maniacal excitement.”

“What could possibly go wrong with a broken leg that could lead to cardiac deficiency?” he asked.

He believes that doctors may have diagnosed blood clots but delayed surgery. His father was told as much in the 1950s by a Montreal nurse who had been on duty the night Morenz died. Negligence, she said.

“I’m just not certain that he got the quality of care that was necessary,” Howard Morenz said.

He finds comfort in the respect his grandfather still enjoys. In Montreal, where the Canadiens inspire quasi-religious devotion, Morenz remains a senior saint, immortalized by a statue outside the team’s Bell Centre home.

Howard Morenz takes pride in his grandfather’s legacy beyond the ice, his stature as a family man, a friend.

“I’d like him to be remembered that way,” he said. “We all lost something a lot more than just a hockey player.”

His regret? “That I didn’t know him. I can only read about him.”

Stephen Smith is the author of “Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada’s Hockey Obsession.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP3 of the New York edition with the headline: Chasing the Stratford Streak, 80 Years Later. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe